During its short life so far, NBC’s splendid fairy tale action-adventure “Grimm” — one of the network’s few nonfootball successes — has been stranded on Friday nights. For company, the network has given it a motley crew of “Dateline,” a few disposable reality shows and the last months of “Chuck.”

“Grimm” returns this week for its third season, and this time it has a legitimate partner, the new vampire drama “Dracula.” Unfortunately, “Dracula,” despite some nice costumes and the glowering presence of the Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, is a mostly drab affair. NBC’s attempt to double the chills on Friday night isn’t working.

Created by the writer Cole Haddon (the comic “The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde”) and produced in association with Sky Living, which will show it in Britain, “Dracula” takes a novel approach to the modern vampire story. Instead of being about pouting teenagers or sex-crazed Southerners, it’s about Bram Stoker’s original vamp, and it’s set in London in the same late-Victorian era as Stoker’s book.

There’s some ingenuity in how Mr. Haddon tweaks the classic setup. Dracula (Mr. Rhys Meyers, “The Tudors”) has entered an uneasy alliance with the vampire hunter Van Helsing (Thomas Kretschmann) to take revenge against a group of all-powerful puppet masters called the Order of the Dragon — as portrayed here, they’re like a more violent Skull and Bones — who used to practice religious terror but have moved on to crony capitalism. To hit the order where it hurts (in the oil reserves), Dracula is developing a remarkably prescient technology: a method of wireless electrical transmission.

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Mr. Rhys Meyers in the pilot.Credit
Jonathon Hession/NBC

Turning Dracula into a fanged insurgent battling ruthless oligarchs is a nifty idea, and the electricity plot allows for diverting steampunk-meets-“Bride of Frankenstein” visuals. But nothing about the show is as much fun as it should be. The storytelling is slow and anemic, spelling everything out at length — through five episodes (of what is a 10-episode mini-series), it feels as if we’re still waiting for the real action to get started.

Despite the requisite blood and gore and the frequent couplings of Dracula and an enforcer for the Order (Victoria Smurfit, barely contained by assorted bustiers), the production is wrapped in the kind of genteel dullness that used to indicate quality in British television imports.

Mr. Rhys Meyers, leading with his dramatic eyebrows, does his best to stoke the melodrama. He’s handicapped, however, by another of the plot’s inventions: To fool the order, Dracula is posing as an American businessman named Grayson. And while there’s nothing exactly wrong with Mr. Rhys Meyers’s American accent, it sticks out and undercuts him during the vampire’s frequent, loud declarations of anger or passion.

Doing good work among the large cast are Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Harker, now a reporter, and Jessica De Gouw as Mina Murray, who appears to already have a supernatural connection to Dracula. Nonso Anozie is an imposing Renfield, now not only sane but supersmart in his role as Dracula’s valet and right-hand man.

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David Giuntoli in “Grimm” on NBC. The show returns on Friday for its third season.Credit
Scott Green/NBC

To be fair, the best episode among the five sent for review was the fifth, in which the action started to kick into gear, and there were touching scenes advancing the relationships between Dracula and Mina, and Dracula and Renfield. But that’s a long time to wait.

There’s no waiting required for “Grimm,” whose premiere picks up at the moment Season 2 ended, with the show’s heroes battling a zombie mob in a Portland, Ore., shipping-container yard. In the first two episodes, Nick (David Giuntoli), the Grimm hereditarily responsible for riding herd on mythological beasts, goes through a comically traumatic series of events that leaves him in a predicament it may take the rest of Season 3 to resolve.

“Grimm” is not a profound show (what is?), but few are more purely entertaining — engaging, clever, tense, funny, well paced and featuring a remarkably appealing cast as the friends and colleagues who help Nick. This plucky troupe is like an adult version of the young witches in the Harry Potter movies or the Scoobies of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Silas Weir Mitchell anchors the show as Monroe, the beast who became Nick’s first ally, in a deceptively delicate performance that constantly balances peace-loving, bourgeois nerdiness with steadfast, formidable strength. Bree Turner, Bitsie Tulloch, Russell Hornsby, Reggie Lee and Sasha Roiz all give their supporting characters personalities that are cleverly and consistently brought into play in every battle, escape and investigation. As an added treat, Jay Karnes joins the show this season in a role that recalls his dogged Detective Dutch Wagenbach in “The Shield.”

Looking back two short years, we can see that “Grimm” wasn’t the only smart and enjoyable show to arrive during the 2011 season — its cohort included “Scandal,” “Person of Interest,” “Revenge” (well, the first season was O.K.), “Prime Suspect” and “Pan Am.” Any of those, even the ones that were quickly canceled, would look pretty good among the roster of leaden dramas introduced so far this fall. It’s as if the broadcast networks, their business increasingly under siege by cable and the Internet, decided that their best strategy was to stop having fun. Which, come to think of it, would explain “Dracula.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 25, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fangs Follow the Fairy Tales. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe